What is a DMP and what different kinds are there? The ABC of DMPs

DMP is a well-worn acronym. Data Management Platforms have promised to magically transform your business from a bunch of jumbled letters to a fully formed language which speaks directly to your customers, and encourages them to buy from you.

But before diving into alphabet soup, let’s slow down, start from the beginning, and look at the different kinds of DMPs and what they do.

 'A' is for Audience DMPs

What are they?
Audience DMPs are unifying platforms used to collect, organize and activate third-party data from any source or channel. 

What value do they propose? 
Via a bunch of branded data providers, Audience DMPs want to help you achieve that long-term goal of attracting predefined, targetable audiences…

What effect will it have on my business goals?
... But remember, this is third-party data: so "predefined" might not mean "relevant to your business". It may or may not relate to your own market's needs. The risk is spending marketing budget on campaigns that have absolutely no relevance to the people that are being targeted by them.

The key here is another acronym: BYOD, or Bring Your Own Data! To remain relevant to your own target market, you need to hold onto it tight, with both hands. It is your secret language with your consumers, a linguistic weapon for all your company’s conversion goals.

HOW TO ACTIVATE YOUR CUSTOMER DATA

M is for Marketing Clouds

What are they? Marketing Clouds are the big one-size-fits-all solutions for data management and activation. Buy their CRM, their web analytics software, their bannering platforms and their SEO tools, and you can have one big integrated platform to target your audience.

What value does it propose? Marketing Clouds will integrate with your own data – that’s the good news. But they are also more costly and rigid, because they sell you their whole suite of products, meaning there’s no flexibility in choosing the best system for each faction of your business.

What effect will it have on my business goals? To be honest, it's not great news. Because marketing clouds are a collection of different technologies under one branded roof, it can slow down the flexibility with which your business receives and activates customers' data across channels. This means that you can't respond to customer behavior in real time, for example, because the data from what they are doing in-store won't reach the digital marketing team until 24 hours later after they're long gone. 

The moral of the story? Find a DMP that is future-proof and will allow you to experiment and speak to your world of consumers in their own individual, and constantly shifting dialects. Or better yet...

IJO is for Intelligent Journey Orchestration with DMP Capabilities

What is it? Ok, to be fair this one doesn't roll off the tongue. But it does answer the business need of any organization that needs to process and respond to large volumes of data. We are talking about a marketing platform that has DMP at the core (not as part of a suite!) but builds on those capabilities with advanced data activation methodology, such as Intelligent Journey Orchestration from Relay42. 

What value does it propose? By activating data in real time, this marketing platform lets you mirror customer behavior across all channels to deliver true one-to-one personalization in real time throughout the entire customer journey. Integrated industry-specific AI models help you to measure, experiment against, and improve the metrics that matter to your business (and your customers).

What effect will it have on my business goals? Your customers will get highly relevant, personalized messaging in-the-moment. And your business will be able to deliver individual customer journeys that increase conversion, loyalty, retention and growth.